Three Daughters of Eve
Jan. 19th, 2025 04:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearI really don't know what to make of Three Daughter's of Eve by Elif Shafak.
From the blurb on the back, it seemed designed to appeal to me - split narrative about a Turkish woman coming to terms with events of her university years in Oxford...
But I really struggled with it all the way through.
I didn't much like Peri, especially in the 'present-day' part of the narrative.
There was an awful lot of didactic telling, the story was very drawn out and slow, especially in the first half. The 'scandal' during Peri's time at Oxford was foreshadowed very heavy-handedly and then delayed over and over again.
It did pick up quite a bit on her initial arrival in Oxford, since there was a lot of nostalgia for me in reading about someone going there to study only a few years after I was there. But quite a few of the details didn't ring true or seemed downright wrong for how things worked at Oxford University at the time, so it felt like the author's research was only so-so.
Two out of the three 'daughters' of the title were barely in it, which was odd.
It seemed as if we were finally going to get to the actual plot in Part III, and then there were multiple instances of religious seminars being laid out on the page verbatim, which made the whole thing drag even more.
I really wasn't sure what to do with the surreal and/or possibly supernatural aspect - and then there was a massive revelation to do with it (as well as another that made one of the characters suddenly seem even worse than before), which came of out nowhere and then also went nowhere.
And then the end had a very abrupt shift that resulted in Peri taking completely nonsensical actions - and then it just stopped.
Hmmm...
I liked the structure of the 'present-day' narrative taking place over the course of a single evening, while the flashbacks covered 20 years. But the most interesting aspect of the whole book to me wasn't shown or really discussed at all (her meeting and relationship with her husband), so I was left feeling rather shortchanged.
I think I must be missing something - but this book didn't really work for me at all.
From the blurb on the back, it seemed designed to appeal to me - split narrative about a Turkish woman coming to terms with events of her university years in Oxford...
But I really struggled with it all the way through.
I didn't much like Peri, especially in the 'present-day' part of the narrative.
There was an awful lot of didactic telling, the story was very drawn out and slow, especially in the first half. The 'scandal' during Peri's time at Oxford was foreshadowed very heavy-handedly and then delayed over and over again.
It did pick up quite a bit on her initial arrival in Oxford, since there was a lot of nostalgia for me in reading about someone going there to study only a few years after I was there. But quite a few of the details didn't ring true or seemed downright wrong for how things worked at Oxford University at the time, so it felt like the author's research was only so-so.
Two out of the three 'daughters' of the title were barely in it, which was odd.
It seemed as if we were finally going to get to the actual plot in Part III, and then there were multiple instances of religious seminars being laid out on the page verbatim, which made the whole thing drag even more.
I really wasn't sure what to do with the surreal and/or possibly supernatural aspect - and then there was a massive revelation to do with it (as well as another that made one of the characters suddenly seem even worse than before), which came of out nowhere and then also went nowhere.
And then the end had a very abrupt shift that resulted in Peri taking completely nonsensical actions - and then it just stopped.
Hmmm...
I liked the structure of the 'present-day' narrative taking place over the course of a single evening, while the flashbacks covered 20 years. But the most interesting aspect of the whole book to me wasn't shown or really discussed at all (her meeting and relationship with her husband), so I was left feeling rather shortchanged.
I think I must be missing something - but this book didn't really work for me at all.
